As soon as he was outside he dropped to his knees and forced another coughing fit; this time it tore at his throat. Then he stood and shoved the wheelbarrow into the grass and pitched it over and watched the papers scatter, sheets of white and cream everywhere, the writing on them like every language in the world, some ancient, others yet to be invented. Pictures and pedigrees and log sheets and notes, everywhere he looked. The story of forty generations. Fifty.

He looked toward the house. His mother lay bound up in Glen Papineau’s arms. When she saw Edgar, she stopped struggling and turned her face to him.

“Let it go, Edgar! Let it go!”

I can’t, he signed. Not yet.

He turned back to the smoldering kennel. His mother’s cries, intertwined with Glen’s moans, made an unnerving duet. The once-narrow ribbon of smoke had become an opaque mass that belched from the top half of the barn’s entryway. He wondered if the straw in the mow had caught fire. Not even the tiniest lick of flame was visible, though plumes of black smoke poured from the roofline.

He understood what it meant to go back into the workshop. He did not believe Claude was there to help him. Yet every file he rescued restored some piece of a world that he thought had been lost forever. For so long he’d lived divided-from his father, from himself, now from Almondine. What he meant to do was not a question for him of wisdom or foolishness, courage or fearlessness, insight or ignorance. It was only that he could not split himself the way he once had; could not choose between imperatives. To resurrect or revenge. To fight or turn away.

Inside were two more cabinets filled with files and the letters from Brooks and the master litter book and The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language with Alexander McQueen’s essay on the significance of naming and page upon page of notes, markers of every dog Edgar had ever known. He pushed the wheelbarrow forward at a trot, and for the last time he passed though the double doors and into the barn. If he worked fast he could be in and out in three minutes. And if he needed more time, he had an idea that might clear the smoke long enough to get everything else.

An idea that had come to him long ago, in a dream.

Claude

THE MOMENT EDGAR DISAPPEARED THROUGH THE WORKSHOP door and into the smoke, Claude snatched open the bottom file drawer and dug the rag-wrapped bundle from beneath the mass of letters and newspaper clippings. The syringe, folded into the oily fabric, worked loose and fell into the drawer and he pawed through the chaos before his fingers touched the round plastic barrel. He retreated across photographs and pedigrees scattered over the floor like a lunatic’s history of the kennel. When he reached the workbench, he turned his back to the room and knelt.

He wrapped the rag around his hand and grasped the bottle through it and worked the stopper loose and with great care set it on the floor away from himself, far back in the corner. He twisted the sheath off the needle. His motions were careful, but he was working in a rush, and by accident he jabbed the needle’s point lightly into the flesh of his right palm. Before he even felt the sting, he’d jerked his hand away. The puncture was too small to release even a single drop of blood, but an infinitesimal red meniscus colored the needle’s point.

When he looked at the bottle again, an iridescent rivulet had crept up the throat of the glass. He set the needle against the shear lip. To see the fluid wick so eagerly into that minute steel artery made his skin crawl. He needed only a drop but half a cc got into the barrel before he could put his thumb above the plunger and even then its insistent, upward force felt to him like some feral thing lunging from its cage. With effort, he pushed all but a fraction back into the bottle. When he drew the syringe away, a silver filament quivered in the air. He set the needle tip against the glass and turned it and withdrew it again, leaving a drop of clear oil that shivered and collapsed and slid down the inner curve of the bottle’s neck. He left the bottle unstoppered and tossed away the rag and turned, holding the syringe at arm’s length, and he waited.

The file cabinets opposite stood hazy and remote through the dense smoke. He wasn’t sure Edgar meant to come back, but he could drop the syringe and be out of the barn in seconds if things suddenly felt unsafe. Fire didn’t move that quickly, he thought. He looked at the bare bulb shining in its ceiling socket and wondered how long before the insulation on the wiring melted. The smoke carried a meaty, awful scent of roasted flesh. A nest of mice, he thought, or a bird in the eaves, overcome. All that smoke and still not a sound, not a flame. Outside, he could hear Trudy crying and calling out.

Then Edgar appeared, hunkered down behind the empty wheelbarrow, bent so low over the thing that the skids scraped the cement floor. He jammed it nose first into the space below the mow stairs and dropped to his knees and yanked open the bottommost drawer of the oldest cabinet-exactly where the bottle had been hidden-and began to heave out letters and papers. Claude stood. He remembered how the old herbalist had used a sharpened reed. How his withered hands had shaken with palsy afterward. Now that seemed like such a mild reaction, for Claude was suddenly conscious of all the mechanism of nerve and muscle and ligament that animated his fingers. The syringe began to tremble in his grip. With his free hand he squeezed his shaking wrist until the bones inside ground against one other.

He crossed the workshop.

The act itself took just an instant.

When it was done he backed away, reaching behind with one hand to swing the workshop door closed. All at once his teeth began chattering and he bit down so hard to make them stop that a groan escaped him. He had to get hold of himself, he thought. All he needed to do now was keep Edgar in the room and let time pass. But his heart threw itself against his ribs and the blood rushing through him felt as heavy as mercury. He pressed his back to the door and slid to the cement, and noticed for the first time that the syringe was still in his hand. With a convulsive jerk, he flung it away. As he had with Gar.

Edgar kept pitching files into the wheelbarrow as if nothing had happened. Then, abruptly, he sat back on his heels and looked over his head and behind, as if startled by a sound. He turned toward Claude, but his gaze hardly lingered. Then he stood and made his way across the workshop, working hand over hand along the shelves beneath the stairs, and he began looking for something in the corner, where the long-handled tools stood in a tangle.

When he turned, Edgar held a pitchfork in his hand.

Aw, God, Claude thought.

But Edgar wasn’t looking at Claude. He walked to the center of the workshop, bent low to keep his face out of the thick mass of smoke. He crouched for a moment, squinting and wiping the tears from his eyes, and swaying as he fixed the position of something near the light fixture on the ceiling.

Then Edgar stood and drove the pitchfork straight up into the smoke.